This afternoon I dropped some packages off at FedEx and then made an impromptu stop at Jo Ann Fabrics. They didn’t have the item I was looking for, but I did buy these great tealight candleholders that are very similar to some I planned to get from Crate and Barrel. (See their version here.)

Crate and Barrel version:  $15, holds 5 candles
Jo Ann Fabrics version: $5, holds 3 candles

After washing these to get all the dust and fingerprints from the store off them, I realized 3 is the perfect size – the longer ones you’d never be able to towel dry and they would end up with spots inside and that’s just annoying.

These ended up in the sunroom, on a $40 craigslist dresser I bought for the space.  The sunroom still needs to be finished.  Right now it’s a graveyard of mismatched random furniture that’s been retired from the house.  But I’ll save that for another post.

I am really craving candles right now.  I don’t know if it’s the drop in temperature, or a general need for coziness.  And I’m really wanting sleek, minimalist candleholders that will work well anywhere in the house.  So these all glass ones really fit the bill, and I like the idea of having similar, but different ones all over the house.   I have this idea for the sunroom where I fill the entire space up with candles.  I mean it’s basically windows on three sides and a brick wall on another, with a concrete floor – is there a place more suitable for a dangerous number of candles?  I can’t do that much damage, right?

My idea is to hang a bunch of  whirlies (photo above) from the ceiling and get some wall mountable holders for the brick wall.  (Like these.)  The former owner left random nails all over the brick and hooks all over the ceiling, so I might as well use them.

I am also really liking these too:
Crate & Barrel | Piper, Pixie, Trix.

CB2 | Union

CB2| Lumi

I can see using all of these in different areas of the house, or grouping them together on the patio table when I need more light.  There I go thinking it’s summer again.  In another week or two there will probably be snow on the patio table.  I really need a second home some place warm for when wedding season ends.

And then I left the house and totally left it sitting on the kitchen table.  DAMNIT!

I am still sick from a month ago, where I went to the ridiculous prompt care where the doctor told me take vitamins and gave me a seven day supply of cough syrup that I rationed out to last me through two wedding weekends.  I really should not still be coughing up green shit at this point, but I am.  Alarmingly so.  My mom and Andy and friends are like GO TO THE DOCTOR and I’m like “What, so he can give me more Vitamin D?”  I don’t have a fever, or really any other symptoms, and the coughing is mostly restricted to early morning and late at night, so if I went to the doctor I would seem pretty normal.

Except the last two days I’ve woken up feeling achy, like flu-achy.  Which is really not good, and the short walk just now to Caribou and the bank just kicked my ass since I’m operating at about 25% lung capacity.  But since I still don’t have a fever or anything that can be scientifically measured, I know the jackass at prompt care is going to assume I’m a hypochondriac and do nothing.

Yes, I should probably get a REAL doctor, one that is confident enough in his/her clinical assessments to, I dunno, prescribe antibiotics and actual medicine, but I don’t like doctors.  It’s a miracle I went to a prompt care to begin with. I am thinking about perhaps going back, but sneaking in some scalding hot coffee, gargling with it, and then swallowing discretely before the nurse walks in to take my temperature.  And then she will be like ZOMG,106!

Our first stop was the coast of Lake Huron in Lexington.  Abby liked running in the sand, but I forgot to bring towels so she couldn’t get in the water.  Which was a shame, because she loves water and I love watching Abby act like a dog, even if  that means digging into a giant mud pit and getting so completely filthy that the only part of her I can make out is her eyes.  (Which has happened.)

Next stop was the Pointe aux Barques Lighthouse in Port Hope.  You can see how thrilled the dog was.  She was very happy to get out actually, and she was very good in the car, even though I forgot to bring a proper bowl for her.  By the mid-point of our travels though, it became obvious we were really interrupting her napping schedule so after a few sniffs of each new locale,  she was ready to lay down and relax.

Andy has better lighthouse pictures, as he was using the tilt-shift, and a polarizer, and didn’t have a dog pulling his arm off, but he hasn’t put any online for me to steal yet.

My photography blog gets more hits for “Yellow lab, pink nose” than anything else.  So here’s my attempt at getting some blog traffic here.  (Check out the West Park blog for more info on yellow labs with pink noses.)  Yes, her nails are too long.  I need to make an appointment at the vets, because cutting them myself scares me.

I know I’ve been a bad blogger.  I’ve been in full on editing mode for two weeks now.  When I started I was 7 weddings behind and had a few albums to order.  I now have 3 weddings edited and 2 albums ordered and one more to go.  I still am determined to try to get two more weddings edited before our next one this Saturday.  I can’t wait for wedding season to end.  I want to be caught up on editing and able to do simple things like grocery shop or walk the dog without feeling guilty about not being working 24/7.  Not that I don’t love what I do, but the business this year is requiring full time hours, and I still have a 9-5 job Monday-Thursday, and it’s just a LOT right now.  We have four more weddings left and then we are done for this year.  Then it’s time to design more albums, and hopefully, by early spring of next year, I’ll have a few weeks with no deadlines hanging over me.  Then it all starts again in May!

1.) How to raise a Monarch Butterfly.  Add this to my list of things I would totally love to do, if I ever had the time.  There are actually five parts to this article, all with really interesting photos.  See them here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

2.)Hive Bookshelf from CB2. I know this is not a practical idea for my house, because it sits on the floor, and would look pretty for one day before pet fur started to waft into the bottom shelves.  Plus this is a bookcase for non-readers, because you can hardly fit any books in it.  That has not stopped me from trying to figure out what I could move or throw out to make room for a bunch of these babies.  Love it.

3.) Roulottes (French Gypsy Caravan). I totally need one of these.  It can live in my backyard a few months a year, and when I truly get fed up, I can travel.  By mule.  I will make money selling incense and reading and tarot cards.  (My friend Jessica wants her own for a traveling capybara circus.)  The possibilities are truly endless.

But a few weeks ago, Andy got sick with this annoying, dry cough.  Annoying to me that is, in that it kept me up all night and it really just sounded like a fake cough.  It was non-productive and he seemed to have no other symptoms, at least at first.  I was pretty much sure he was just doing it for sympathy.  Then his ears filled up with fluid and he was deaf for two weeks.  Again, annoying.  To me.  Because every time I opened my mouth to talk, he would cut me off to grunt “EH???”  Not, “What?” not, “Sorry, didn’t hear that.”, not “Come again?”, but “EH???”  Over and over and over.  He was irritated that he couldn’t hear, I was irritated by the EH??? and he was still coughing like a mofo every night, so neither one of us slept and were both miserable.

Then I started to get The Tickle.

You know the one, that tickle that starts at the back of your throat and registers for a fraction of a second as a minor annoyance, one that will be gone in a quick swallow until your brain goes “Holy shit, it’s The Tickle” and you double over choking uncontrollably?  That’s the one.  I swear I have it worse than anyone else.  I have childhood memories of The Tickle and how awful and embarrassing it was when it happened at school.  Because I really cannot stop coughing.  I can force myself by you know, not breathing, and then my face turns red, and my eyes leak out tears, and the few people in the room who aren’t aware that I am choking to death are alerted when people notice and think I am sobbing uncontrollably and ask “Are you OK?”.  No goddammit, I have The Tickle.

Every time I get sick it’s the same.  The general crumminess of the viral infection.   Then  The  Tickle starts.  It gets so bad that my throat turns to sandpaper and becomes so irritated that all I can do is cough, even when I don’t need to.  It becomes a non-voluntary reflex.  It wears me out.  Then I end up with bronchitis, strep throat, or pneumonia.   Once it got so bad that I woke up in the night unable to breathe and had to go to the ER.  I was convinced I was going to suffocate, and was making these awful gasping noises that freaked out my one evil cat.  Who then decided to attach himself to my leg as I hobbled to a phone to call my mom to take me to the ER.  Just stop for a moment and picture this.  Here I am, convinced if I don’t at least make my way to the common area of my condo building before I pass out that it will be days before people find me, and I have a 17lb cat with every claw fully embedded into my thigh and I’m dragging him with me, while on the phone trying to gasp out the words “DYING. ER. NOW”.  It is still fuzzy what was more painful, the not breathing part, or the claw wounds which soaked my jeans in blood.

I fucking hate that Tickle.  Even more than I hate going to the doctor, it turns out.

We are a little over the halfway point of wedding season and I have 9 consecutive weeks with weddings, before I get a weekend off, then more after that.  I can’t get sick.  I don’t have the time for it.  So I decided to act like a grown-up and be proactive.  I went to the doctor at the beginning stages of my sickness rather than waiting for one of my tonsils to fall off.

Problem was, I went to the damn doctor and I don’t have a temperature, my nose isn’t running, and I haven’t lost my voice yet.  So he gave me cough syrup and told me to take Vitamin D.  VITAMIN D.  Ok, I get that taking antibiotics w/o need is just contributing to superbugs which may wipe out the entire world – I aced mircobiology.  Pre-med, remember?  But dude, I have weddings to photograph.  Just give me a Z-pack and we can keep this on the down low.  I promise not to take it unless I need it.

Also, Doctor?  Remember the five minutes you spent staring at my boobs trying to decipher the writing on my decade-old Nightmare Before Christmas T-shirt ?   That was awkward. I knew I should have scraped together a better outfit, but seriously, it was laundry day, and I was sick, and seriously, if you can’t figure out what the t-shirt says and I tell you I don’t remember and can’t read it upside down that’s your clue to STOP STARING AT ME.

I am now carrying around a pillbox and trying to diligently take my Vitamin D, and for good measure, other supplements I’ve purchased, but haven’t had the discipline to remember to take every morning.  So far my pee is a brilliant shade of yellow, but The Tickle is still there.  I just had the most glorious coughing fit 20 minutes ago which caused me to almost puke up my lunch.  Thanks for the Vitamin D, doc!

]]> http://alceria.net/2010/09/20/the-tickle/feed/ 0 http://alceria.net/2010/09/17/hello-world/ http://alceria.net/2010/09/17/hello-world/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 08:42:35 +0000 Lynn http://alceria.net/?p=1 Starting is always the worst. I’ve had wordpress installed for days now, and even made an attempt to start a blog a few weeks ago, with a different domain name, but didn’t get far. It feels weird to be starting a new blog. I started blogging (before it was even called that) on livejournal back in 2001, and before that, I had a personal site that I updated with my writing, photography, and art projects. I was so resistant to move to LJ because I thought it would kill me creativity. I used to pride myself in making really cool websites and updating them with my latest passions. Of course back then, if you knew how to make an image map, you were pretty fancy. Livejournal did make things too easy, and let me get lazy creatively.  It became more about writing (ok, whining) and I lost the visual art focus.  Then it just started looking too much like myspace and I found myself abandoning it for faceook, another site I initially avoided, because if LJ had made it too easy to give up posting art and photography, facebook made it too easy to give up writing in general.

Throughout all of this, I kept real, paper journals. But to be honest, I’ve been so busy the last two and a half years that they were mostly abandoned.

That said, I miss having a place to write, post images, and vent.  I fully realize the last thing the internet needs is another blog, but here it is.

And now, time for the usual, boring, biographical exposition:

I am 32 years old  and feel like I’m treading water.  After wasting my twenties riddled with self-doubt about what I should be doing with my life, I started a photography business with my live-in boyfriend, Andy, about three years ago. We specialize in weddings. For now.  In the meantime, I still have bills to pay, so I also have a very unfulfilling day job where I basically sit at a desk all day and try not to go into cardiac arrest from boredom.  This job is killing me creatively, it’s making me bitter and angry, and I really just need out of there.  So that’s one of the goals I’m working towards.

I also purchased a house 3 years ago, before the real estate market crashed, when mortgages were plentiful to anyone who had a pulse.  I closed on the house in July, and was asked to shoot my first wedding that November.  If I had known I’d be starting a business a few months later, I never would have bought this particular house, even though I love it and love the neighborhood.  The taxes are crazy high and everything that could possibly break, wear out, or otherwise malfunction did just that.  After installing a new roof, new windows, new hot water heater, new boiler, and suffering through a half dozen basement floods which resulted in a sewer line replacement, I find myself now, just starting to decorate and turn a boxy 50′s colonial into something a little more fun.  So I’ve recently become a little obsessed with design blogs, and furniture stores.

My life right now can be summed up as:  work, work, work, stress, work, stress, work, sleep, work, work, work.  I used to have lots of hobbies and interests, now I’m just on auto-pilot as the list of tasks I need to finish seem to grow exponentially, while the time I have to do them stays constant. Photography has gone from a passion and interest to a job. I can’t remember the last time I picked up a camera for myself.  And that stinks. So one of the goals for this blog will be to use my camera for myself.

So there you go.  First post is done.  Hopefully the next won’t feel as awkward.